[2004] FAMILY HOLIDAYS   

0065 The Cottage and Welsh hill farms

The cottage we rented, and used as a holiday home in the Welsh mountains, had originally been a small farm. The house part of it, which was attached to the cow stalls and hayloft, was small. It had one living room downstairs, along with a small kitchen. Up some very narrow stairs it had one main bedroom. The other room upstairs, which you passed through on your way to the main bedroom, originally had been part of the hayloft, but sometime in the past - perhaps the Victorian era (because the partition wall was made up of lath and plaster) - it had been separated off. This was where I slept.

 Like all the hill farms in the area the cottage was made out of local materials.  Specifically the walls were made out of the local stones, piled up with mortar to a thickness of something like 18 inches.  The roof was made of local slate.  The windows were very small perhaps only 18 inches square – and only in the living room, kitchen and the main bedroom.  Roof flights, still small, had been inserted, probably at a later stage, in the two bedrooms. It was a very dark house, but also very cosy.

From the front door of which was partially protected by a large slate canopy you entered straight into the living room; though there was a wooden storage divider on the left as you entered, which created a sort of lobby.

The living room itself was perhaps 12 feet 16 feet, and the area near the small window behind the storage partition was used as the dining area. The rest of the room focused on the range. It incorporated a traditional cooking range, with a tank for hot water on the left and an oven on the right. It was, needless to say, a very substantial feature with supporting walls perhaps two feet thick.  The room overall was floored in red earthenware tiles.  On the other hand, it probably had slate or even bare rock underneath, which had formed the original floor when it was built. 

The kitchen also had the tiniest of windows. By it, the very narrow corkscrew stairs went up to the first floor.  Its floor of was partly slate and partly the original stone underneath the cottage.

Indeed the whole cottage was built into the hillside so that, around the back, the level of the earth was about five feet deep against the walls.  The cottage itself must have actually been cut into the rock since the hillside behind was part of a rocky hill that went up at almost a 45 degree angle.  But this sheltered the cottage and protected it from the worst gales. This seemed to be fairly common practice, because the larger farm over the hill followed pretty much the same pattern.

As I said, when you went up the stairs the initial first floor bedroom only had a roof light. It was also unusual in that one wall was lath and plaster, where the rest of the cottage had rough stone walls.  The other side of the lath and plaster was the small hayloft; and indications were that in earlier periods this too had been part of the house proper and the workers probably slept on the hay.  The old worker, Ned, in the farm over the hill certainly still slept in their hayloft in this way.

A door led through to the main bedroom which was again reasonably sized and had a fireplace so it could be kept warm in winter; though we, of course, never visited in the depths of winter and never had need to use that fire. As you might expect, this was a wooden floored room.

Underneath the hayloft there was a the byer for cows; just a room with a stone floor in which the cows had been kept.  Indeed, the local farmer still kept cows in there during the winter; even when we were on-site, since – as the cottage was at an altitude of something over 1,000 feet above sea level - the weather was very severe at that height.  Beyond that were a range of pigsties.  At the back there was also a Dutch barn, which must have been added at a much later stage.

This pattern was fairly similar for the other farms around. In particular the farm that we spent much time working with, over the hill, had very much the same layout; though it was bigger.  Thus in front of its farmhouse, where in the case of the cottage we had grassed the area over to a form a lawn, was a very muddy farmyard.  The farmhouse itself followed pretty much the same pattern as the cottage.  The living room was big, with slate floors and a massive range.  Like the cottage the ceiling featured massive oak beams, almost 12 inches by 12 inches, holding the floors above. Here, though, hanging from the beams, dangled legs of bacon waiting to be carved for the meals that the farmers ate. They still used the range to do all  the cooking, where - at the cottage - we used the separate kitchen, initially with primus stoves and eventually with Calor gas stoves, which enabled us to cook pretty much as normal.

Outside that bigger farmhouse again there was a range of buildings. There were the shippams, as the farmer called them, where the cows could be kept in the winter; and also originally one in which the horses, the cart horses, were kept.  There were pigsties, which provided the bacon on which the farmer lived most of the year.  The other side though there was also a milking parlour and the dairy. The milking parlour was quite simply another stone floor room but with rails to which the cows could be attached, so that the farmer could milk them by hand.  The dairy was very much the same except that, in contrast with the rest of the farm, it was kept scrupulously clean and contained the equipment for separating the cream, storing the milk and making the butter. 

As a favour, I was once or twice allowed to milk a cow, where these were still hand milked, and to separate the cream in a form of centrifuge; and then churn the small quantity of butter which was used by the farmers themselves. Most of the milk, in traditional churns, was however carried up to the road; where it was picked up by the lorry from the local dairy.

As the farmyard was often ankle deep in mud, along with less savoury materials, I always wore my Wellington boots when I visited -- though the farmer herself, and her brother who helped to run the farm, wore heavy industrial boots instead. Across the other side of farmyard were the sheds in which the mechanical implements, almost the only concession to modern times, were kept. Around the back, once more, was the Dutch barn where the main hay store was kept.

The interesting thing was that, if you accept the different local materials, the whole principle was very much like that which I found later in Ethiopia.  In Ethiopia though, the local material was mud so the houses were built with mud bricks -- there was no heavy rain to dissolve them as there would have been in Wales.  Their roofs were originally thatched, but now are corrugated iron since this is the most easily available roofing material in Ethiopia.  The point was that the shape, and the feel, of the farms in Ethiopia was very much the same as that of the hill farms in Wales, taking advantage of local materials and local weather conditions. As a result, I felt quite at home there.

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